Today we want to talk to the relationship between chiropractic and hearing loss, often referred to as eustachian tube dysfunction. What we have found is, that a lot of times when people come to us with hearing loss, they look at the ear, and they see there’s really nothing wrong with the ear. But somehow or another, the message from the ear to the brain is not getting there like it’s supposed to, so we have a degree of hearing loss. Sometimes total, sometimes partial.
The message that goes from the ear to the brain, which records the hearing, it travels across a nerve. The nerve is called the vestibular cochlear nerve. If there is interference to the nerve itself, then the message gets to the ear normally, it’s transmitted via the nerve normally, but somewhere between the nerve and the brain, it gets distorted, which can interfere with the message so that it interferes with the hearing, or the reception or the interpretation that the brain may get.
What we have found is that there is only one place in the body that can actually interfere with that particular message from the ear to the brain, and that’s right up here at the brain stem. That vestibular cochlear nerve is a cranial nerve, which comes off the brain stem, and goes back up into the ear. The message comes from the ear, travels along that nerve, comes out the skull, back to the brainstem down here. If the bone is out of position, say down in here and compressing that brainstem, then like stepping on a garden hose, it can create that eustachian tube dysfunction, or quite simply a lack of hearing, or inability to hear.
We’ve found that if we can find that, and if we can put the bone back in position so that it takes the pressure off the brain stem, stops the interfering with the message from the ear to the brain. It’s kind of like lifting your foot off the garden hose. Then suddenly, the messages start to normalize, and people start to hear again.
Matter of fact, chiropractic was founded when hearing was restored. Harvey Lillard was a janitor who had been deaf for 16 years, and DD Palmer was the guy who founded chiropractic. What he found was a lump up here in the top of his neck, and it was where that bone had moved out of position. He went and pushed on that lump, and the lump went away. Well, on the third day he did that, suddenly Harvey Lillard got his hearing back. So that’s how chiropractic was founded, was that he was able to restore somebody’s hearing, by correcting the position of a bone in the neck.
We have done this for 25 years, at the Upper Cervical Spine Center. We’ve found that people that have a lack of hearing, if they have a misalignment at the top of their neck, that could be the cause. By correcting that misalignment, we can reverse the cause, and the ear can actually start to work as it was intended.